Kelly is an early-stage and growth investor at Index Ventures, where she partners with founders building category-defining companies. She is drawn to founders that are relentlessly curious, deeply resilient, and have found a problem that uniquely fits their strengths.
Before joining Index, Kelly invested at CapitalG, backing companies like Stripe, Base Power, Monzo, and Farther. Earlier in her career, she worked as a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group. She holds a B.S. in Mathematics from MIT.
Kelly is based in San Francisco and in her spare time races triathlon professionally in long-distance races, spends time on the water, and is attempting to pick up tennis.
How does your background inform your approach to investing?
As a professional triathlete and former rower, I've spent my life learning that success rarely comes from a single breakthrough moment. It comes from showing up every day, adapting when things don't go to plan, and building the kind of resilience that lets you perform when conditions are hardest. I believe the same qualities enable really smart people to become exceptional founders.
What qualities do you look for in founders?
Hustle, genuine passion, and an almost stubborn need to make the world better. The founders I admire most are relentlessly curious people who never stop interrogating their assumptions and pushing into the edges of what they don't yet know. I want to meet people who have leaned in on their spike, rather than eliminating weakness, who have identified something true about the world that others have missed, and who can't imagine doing anything other than fixing it.
I'm particularly drawn to founders who embrace complexity. The most durable companies are often built in spaces that are structurally difficult, where the problem is hard to define, the market is fragmented, and conventional wisdom says it can't be done. A founder who has chosen a hard problem, and has the intellectual honesty to know what they don't yet know, is usually someone worth betting on.
What’s your approach to working with founders?
Sport taught me that the sum of a great team is almost always greater than its individual parts. When you put the right people against the right challenge, something remarkable can happen that none of them could have achieved alone. That's the spirit I try to bring to every founder relationship. I want to be a genuine member of the team, someone who is as bought into the outcome as the people building it every day.
The goal is always to be the person they want to call first with bad news, and hopefully in the top 10 with good news.